At 09:24 AM 4/30/2003 -0400, Rebecca S. Guenther wrote: >As for indicating cataloging rules, we have thought of that and thought it >was overkill to add. But if others think it important we could consider >putting it in recordInfo in this next set of changes. We already have a >list we use in MARC at: >http://www.loc.gov/marc/relators/reladesc.html#rela040b >I suppose we would say that if the element isn't filled in, no rules are >used or specified. I think the big issue is that much metadata does not have any cataloging rules at all, or the rules are internal to a system and unknowable. But when a MODS record is the result of a transformation it might be good to know something about the original record -- i.e. was it a MARC21 record? a PubMed record? a Dublin Core record? a Dublin Core record from a particular database? I wouldn't want to get too formal about this, but I can say that in the OpenURL community, where the OpenURL is generated from some metadata on the network, having information about the origin of the metadata is very useful in terms of interpreting data elements and debugging problems. This is done fairly simply, giving the vendor and the database: elsevier.com:ScienceDirect; oclc.org:WorldCat. (Hmmm, since it's possible to download record in a variety of formats, it might be necessary to include the format. Drat! I'm trying to keep it simple.) This source identifier, combined with a local record ID, would also allow one to go back to the original metadata if necessary or desired. kc ------------------------------------- Karen Coyle Ph. 510/987-0567 California Digital Library Oakland, CA Fx. 510/763-2471 -------------------------------------